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Thursday, August 6, 2015

Non-Fiction: Review of Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene

I think
it’s fair to say most everyone middle-aged and older in the English speaking
world has heard the name Graham Greene.Writing in nearly all forms and many of his books adapted for the silver
screen, he is one of the main literary figures of the 20 th century.The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana,
The Honorary Consul, and The End of the Affair are major novels
that deftly mix sharp prose, subtle drama, and interests that delicately combine
personal and political concern.

Set in a
variety of locations far adrift from his native Albion, many of his novels
travel the world.And the settings are
not without personal knowledge; Greene himself visited many of the places he
would later set his novels in.One of
his first published works is the record of a one-month trip in Liberia in
1935.Greene calls Journey Without Maps (1936) his quest to find Joseph Conrad’s
‘heart of darkness’, but there is speculation that the trip may have also
served to kill a few other birds, government work and supplementing fiction
sales among them.

Regardless
of reason, Journey Without Maps is
not the account of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed man in the prime of his life out
to explore the wilds of the Earth.The
prose oscillating between erratic and fluid, brooding and contemptuous, concerned
and observant, it seems to mirror Greene’s attitude toward the trip.As if driven by personal demons, he consumes
vast quantities of whiskey (something which a significant portion of his
carriers seems to have been bound up in lugging day to day), is touchy toward
the other whites he encounters, and seems to wallow in the depravity of
civilization—The Power and the Glory coming
across as more autobiographical than fictional in comparison.

Like a revelation,
when I was fourteen, I realized the pleasure of cruelty; I wasn’t interested
any longer in walks on commons, in playing cricket on the beach.There was a girl lodging close by I wanted to
do things to; I loitered outside the door hoping to see her.I didn’t do anything about it, I wasn’t old
enough, but I was happy; I could think about pain as something desirable and
not as something dreaded.It was as if I
had discovered that the way to enjoy life was to appreciate pain.”

Running or
escaping as much as he is trying to find something, Journey Without Maps is by turns cathartic and informative.There is as much about Greene himself in the
travelogue as Africa.Readers looking
for a portrait of Liberia in 1935 will thus achieve some degree of satisfaction
from Greene’s narrative, but by the same token, may grow frustrated with the
regular inanition.

In fact
reading more like one of his novels, Journey
Without Maps is not what one immediately thinks of when they think of
travelogues or travel writing.Greene
maintaining some distance throughout, tossing in bits and pieces of
autobiography as the situation suits, the narrative is more dense and variable
than the average Greene novel, and as a whole reads somewhere between fiction
and non-fiction.The effect seemingly
intentional, Greene even went so far as to elide a few key elements of reality
from his journey.His cousin Barabara
his companion throughout the trip, nowhere does she receive mention. (Her
version of the trip was published in Too
Late to Turn Back.)